Women want sex.

Woah.

I am sorry that I may be speaking on something that is supposed to be silenced or kept a secret. Women are to be passive and gentle, while men are dominant and strong. If a female has sexual desires and is open about her sexuality she is a “slut.” When a male acts upon his sexual desires and is open about his sexuality, whether it comes off too strong or not, he is a “stud.”  So, is it that males are more sexual than females or that women are more quiet about it in fear of being slut shamed?

Women are humans with sexual organs. We aren’t dolls that only do what men or society tells or guides us to do.

The secret is out. Women want sex too.  Because of these norms and stereotypical views, the portion of society that thinks this way feeds into the culture that women are passive and somewhat inferior.

Dr. Adina Nack is a sociology professor at California Lutheran University and a medical  sociologist. She  has found in her research that society “is more likely to view a female STD patient as promiscuous and damaged than a male STD patient.”

“My research found that infected women most often used the word “dirty” to describe how they felt after receiving a STD diagnosis,” Nack said in an email interview.

These stereotypes are serious. They aren’t just posing a mental health issue on women but an overall health issue as well. Women should feel comfortable getting tested without the fear that they will be looked at as “dirty.”

“It’s now more statistically normal for adults to have been infected with HPV than not, there’s still a myth that only promiscuous people contract STDs,” Nack said. “If the American public cannot get over the myth that STDs only happen to promiscuous people, then STD vaccines, like Gardasil, will not gain enough support and acceptance to truly make an impact on a sexually transmitted epidemic like HPV.”

In a poll done by The Echo on Twitter, 55 percent of the 53  voters thought that men had a higher sex drive than women.

Again, do men really have a higher sex drive or are women just quiet about it?

Dr. Dru Pagliassotti is the chair of the Communication Department at Cal Lutheran and has done research on gender and sexuality in popular culture.

“I don’t really think there is some sort of biological essential difference between men and women. I think that in this case, attitudes towards sex, it seems to me, is basically culturally conditioned,” Pagliassotti said.

That’s it. Women are brought up from little girls to want love and marriage, but sex is hardly a topic of discussion…because, a woman who wants sex? Never.

The truth is women want sex and that is normal. You would think by 2017 we would have stopped feeding into these double standards.

Women are constrained in thoughts that they must be pure.  Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with not wanting to engage in sexual activity.

What is wrong is the fact that the women that do wish to act upon their sexual desires are looked down upon or considered to be cheap?

According to a blog post on The Huffington Post titled “Men, Women and Libido,” “healthy young women have approximately 10 times more circulating testosterone in their bodies — which is thought to be the key hormone underlying sexual desire in both men and women — than estradiol, the most potent form of estrogen.”

This reveals that women do in fact have sexual desires. It is wrong that males are able to freely discuss their sexual desires and even be praised for them, but women have to silence themselves or else they will be shamed.

“There are definitely stereotypes about women. Stereotypically, especially in the Victorian period, women were either angels or whores…and that has continued today,” said Pagliassotti.

Stereotypes do nothing but harm. A woman is a woman. She is human. So, just like men, women want sex too.

Maryssa Rillo
Opinion Editor